'm not to talk about the guy is behind social security and medicare, and then talk about medicare because that's the big driver of our deficits right now. you know, my grandmother -- some of you know -- helped to raise me. my grandparents did. my grandfather died a while back. my grandmother died three days before i was elected president. she was fiercely independent. she worked her way up, only a high-school education. she ended up being vice president of the local bank. she ended up living alone by choice. and the reason she to be independent was because of social security and medicare. she had worked all her life, put in this money, and understood there was a basic guarantee, a floor under which she could not go. that is the perspective i bring when i think about what's called entitlements. the name itself implies some sense of dependency on the part of these folks. these are folks who have worked hard, like my grandmother, and there are millions of people out there counting on this. so my approach is to say, how to strengthen the system over the long term? and in medicare, we did was said,
